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Early-stage Venture Capital investor. Startup mentor. Generally curious…
Articles by Nick
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Seed is a journey, not a destination
Seed is a journey, not a destination
Ok, true confession: back in 1993-1994, when I was in 7th grade, I was more than a little obsessed with Aerosmith’s new…
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Part 2: Han’s Journey to Landing a Job in Venture Capital at Differential Ventures
Part 2: Han’s Journey to Landing a Job in Venture Capital at Differential Ventures
In my last post, ‘Can I buy you a coffee? So how do I get a job in Venture Capital?’ we peeled back the curtain a bit…
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Can I buy you coffee? So how do I get a job in Venture Capital?
Can I buy you coffee? So how do I get a job in Venture Capital?
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: getting a job in Venture Capital is hard. There is no one path but there are…
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What should go in my pitch deck? HELP!!
What should go in my pitch deck? HELP!!
Ah… the struggle. You’ve done all the leg work - the HARD parts, really.
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How do I get a meeting with a VC??
How do I get a meeting with a VC??
The Ascent Conference starts today! I'm looking forward to being there and will be hosting a roundtable discussion on…
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Nick Adams shared thisHot topics!Nick Adams shared thisHappening tomorrow at 12pm ET! Join our Managing Partner, David Magerman, in conversation with Matthew Lyberg, CFA, Nicholas Ginsberg and Andrew Kaplan. Link to register: https://lnkd.in/e3Bwn-2d
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Nick Adams shared thisLast call! We have just a few spots left for our SF happy hour tomorrow night. Register below to join me, a bunch of talented founders, fellow VCs, Corp dev execs, and other friends of Differential for light bites and drinks.
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Nick Adams shared thisJust getting started!Nick Adams shared thisIt’s been an exciting start to the year at Differential! Highlighting some great updates from five of our portfolio companies to close out the quarter: Cognota Ocrolus Circuit Mind Personal AI PostSig, Inc. And welcome to Leah Mitchell who has joined us as Chief of Staff! Full details of our Q1 highlights are linked in the comments below.
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Nick Adams shared thisMy boy is wicked smahhht…Nick Adams shared thisBen Affleck just explained AI better than most tech CEOs. "It goes to the mean. To the average. And it's really shitty." He's right. Generative AI converges on what's statistically common. That's why it's useful for structure and reference. And why it sounds generic when you ask it to create something meaningful from scratch. He also called out the hype: "A lot of that rhetoric comes from people trying to justify valuations." GPT-5 is roughly 25% better than GPT-4. Costs about four times as much to run. The steep curve is levelling off. Getting better now means getting expensive. Affleck isn't dismissing AI. He's describing what it actually is. Right now it’s a tool. Like visual effects. Useful for removing friction from tedious, expensive work. Not replacing the human core. Creativity comes from lived experience, taste, judgment. Things you can't average your way into. The people building AI need it to change everything. The people using it are discovering it's incredibly useful but within parameters. Funny how the clearest thinking comes from a filmmaker, not a founder.
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Nick Adams posted thisWe're heading into the Perfect Storm of a looming talent crisis with the adoption of half-baked AI solutions, an aging workforce entering retirement age, and a generation of students coming out of school less prepared for the work environment than any previous cohort. The culmination of these dynamics place massive amounts of pressure on Learning & Development teams who have never had a proper operating system to manage training needs while balancing the workloads of trainers and SMEs. That explains the massive week Cognota just had! First, they just announced a Series B round of funding to scale their operations and to support the other huge announcement of the week: a partnership with market leader Cornerstone OnDemand! Congratulations to Ryan Austin and the entire Cognota team. Excited for the next 5 years of this journey! #entrepreneurship #startups #founders #vc #fundraising https://lnkd.in/eqmhw2mq
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Nick Adams shared thisGreat partnership for customers of Cornerstone OnDemand and Cognota! The joint solution will create a lot of leverage for L&D teams at a time when training and upskilling employees has never been more important.Nick Adams shared this🚀Exciting Partnership Update! We’re thrilled to announce an expanded partnership between Cognota and Cornerstone OnDemand empowering enterprise learning and talent teams to operationalize Learning & Development like never before. Through this new reseller agreement, Cornerstone OnDemand can now offer Cognota’s LearnOps® platform directly to their customers, bringing together the best of both worlds: 🔹AI-powered learning and talent experiences from Cornerstone OnDemand 🔹Operational discipline, planning, and governance from Cognota Together, we’re enabling teams to plan smarter, execute faster, and prove measurable learning impact through true operational visibility and budget control. 🗣️As our CEO Ryan Austin shared, “The shift from ad hoc learning operations to a disciplined LearnOps model gives L&D teams the structure they need to make—and prove—their impact.” Learn more about how Cognota and Cornerstone OnDemand are building a LearnOps-powered talent ecosystem: https://bit.ly/3OSS5GQ #LearnOps #L&D #LearningOperations #Cornerstone #Cognota #LearningEcosystem #HRTech #TalentDevelopmentCornerstone and Cognota Announce Expanded Partnership, Delivering LearnOps-Powered Ecosystem for Learning and Talent TeamsCornerstone and Cognota Announce Expanded Partnership, Delivering LearnOps-Powered Ecosystem for Learning and Talent Teams
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Nick Adams shared thisWho wants to talk about LLMs??Nick Adams shared thisSEEKING ENTERPRISE LLM USERS: I'm planning another webinar/conversation about LLMs/AI. I'd like to include a panel of 4-5 enterprise AI users, team managers who are using LLM-based tools in production in large companies. If you fit that description, send me an email (my first name at differential.vc), describing the group you manage and how you are using LLMs. Once I have a panel selected, I'll share the date/time for the planned discussion and give instructions for signing up.
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Nick Adams reposted thisA quick note to VC teams and Solo GPs in my network: Aumni is sunsetting at the end of March, but the work that made you rely on it is not. Year-end reporting still happens. LP diligence still shows up. Consent checks, side letters, protective provisions, audit requests, and compliance questions do not pause just because a platform goes dark. The failure mode I’m worried about is not picking a new tool. It’s getting dragged into weeks of manual cleanup and rework, and losing portfolio visibility right when you need it most. That’s why we built PostSig Investor Rights Intelligence, an intelligence-first path beyond Aumni that avoids the people-heavy, tagging-heavy onboarding model. If you’re an Aumni customer, you can export your Aumni ZIP files, upload them into PostSig (or we can handle the transfer), and get live quickly with funds and portfolio companies mapped into Investor Rights Intelligence dashboards. No re-tagging. No re-modeling. No months-long implementation cycle. This is an upgrade, not a migration. Blog: https://hubs.li/Q0420S6_0 #VentureCapital #FundOperations #LegalOps #PortfolioIntelligence #InvestorRights #PostSigNick Adams reposted thisWhat Comes After Aumni? Portfolio intelligence that does not go dark. The Aumni sunset is weeks away. Audits, year-end reporting, and investor requests are not. As an approved vendor, PostSig offers an intelligence-first path forward for Aumni customers. ✅ Export your Aumni data ✅ Upload your ZIP files or let us handle it ✅ Go live with portfolio and investor rights intelligence almost immediately No months of cleanup. No manual rework. Move forward with portfolio intelligence built for what comes next. 👉 Read more: https://hubs.li/Q0420S6_0 Aumni #VentureCapital #PortfolioIntelligence #InvestorRights #LegalTech #PostSig #AI
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Nick Adams shared thisGreat group!Nick Adams shared thisFantastic to reconnect with so many familiar faces and meet new founders and investors at the Lytical Ventures and Differential Ventures Enterprise Tech & AI Happy Hour! Many thanks to our co-hosts Craig L., Lucas Nelson, Graham Carroll, Taylor Margot as well as Nick Adams and Tom Driscoll for bringing everyone together. Here’s to more great conversations and continued momentum in AI innovation in the year ahead. #Founders #AI #AIInnovation #CollabagenticAI #NYCTech #EnterpriseTech #VentureCapital #StartupEcosystem #TechFounders #EnterpriseAI #TechLeadership Adam Mosam, Adit Arora, Anirudh Singh, Antonia Abraham, Avi Cohen, Avi Lindenbaum, Charlie Federman, Dan Abelon, Dorothy Chang, Elad Baron, Erin Kelly, Greg Bergamesco, Imran Tehal, Justin Wexler, Kelley Mak, Kevin Ghim, Lief Haniford, Luke Moretti, Mendy Yang, Michal Edelman Tepper, Peter R., Rachel ten Brink, Ray Cheng, Sallie Jian, Sam Pranikoff, Sunil Rao, Ted Hill, Terri Wang, Timothy D. Malloy, Esq., Tyler Zengo
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Nick Adams liked thisNick Adams liked thisOn June 11 in Los Angeles, Adam Rian - Ph.D. and I are running Unleashing Claude on CRE Asset Management, a one-day hands-on program for senior CRE leaders on deploying Claude agentically across real asset management workflows including portfolio reporting, lease and legal document versioning, and financial analysis. Adam is the founder and CEO of Aktus AI and an adjunct professor at Columbia. There are 30 seats, and early registration closes May 20. Link is in the comments.
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Nick Adams liked thisNick Adams liked thisDay 3, and the momentum at Think 2026 shows no signs of slowing down. The last couple of days have been packed, but the conversations and the company have made it all worthwhile. From the energy at IBM Canada Night to the Build Partner Meet and Greet, followed by the visit to the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, it’s been a masterclass in where the industry is headed. We’re all focused on the same goal: moving past the "experimental" phase of AI to build autonomous, agentic systems that solve enterprise-scale problems. Specially great catching up with Rob Thomas, Grant Millar, Joe Ashton, Raj Datta, Nick Rogers The adrenaline is high, and the potential for Agentic AI in HR transformation is something I could talk about for hours but for now, it's time to head back to the floor! If you’re still around this afternoon and want to continue the discussion, let’s grab a coffee. #Think2026
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Nick Adams liked thisNick Adams liked thisI first stepped into venture capital in 2014 in Prague. You could count the number of early-stage VC funds per country in Central Europe on one hand. Valuations were multiples lower than their US counterparts, talent pools were distinct, and the venture ecosystems had little, if any, practical overlap. Over a decade later, the landscape is unrecognizable. With scaled regional funds, specialized local players, and a handful of trans-Atlantic firms, founders have an entirely different set of options. More choice, though, brings more complexity, and the tension between driving local impact and chasing global scale has only grown. Having straddled different ecosystems throughout my career – through Credo Ventures in Prague, LAUNCHub Ventures in Sofia, Laconia in New York and now Zurich – I find the tradeoffs and contradictions endlessly fascinating. I’m excited to explore this topic at SuperReturn Venture in Berlin with Ben Lerer (Lerer Hippeau), Laura González-Estéfani (TheVentureCity), and Eric Fitzgerald (Top Tier Capital Partners). Bring your hardest questions! If you’re attending, reach out, and if you’re still deciding, code FKR3667SPK20 gets you 20% off.
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Nick Adams liked thisNick Adams liked thisTwo weeks until ISPOR 2026 in Philadelphia! One question we hear constantly from pharma and life sciences teams: "We have the data. We just can't use it." Regulatory constraints, privacy obligations, cross-border data sharing restrictions... The data exists, but getting it into an AI pipeline or a research collaboration without a legal sign-off problem is the hard part. That's exactly what Limina is built to solve. Context-aware de-identification that preserves analytical value while meeting HIPAA, GDPR, and study-specific privacy requirements. We'll be at Booth 1038. If you want to connect while you're there, reach out and we'll set something up. #ISPOR2026 #HEOR #DataDeidentification #ClinicalData #PharmaAI #RealWorldEvidence #DataPrivacy
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Nick Adams liked thisNick Adams liked thisOn Pi Day (3/14) in 2012, at a Two Sigma strategy offsite, I proposed the launch of Two Sigma Ventures, based on three primary hypotheses: 1) New York was emerging as a startup ecosystem; 2) data + advanced computing were going to be the core drivers of innovation over the next 30+ years, and 3) Two Sigma had tons of smart people that could help. 130+ companies later, I'm incredibly proud of and grateful for what TSV has built over these last 14 years. Today, building on those same convictions, my colleagues Dusan Perovic, Sidney Costabile, and Jonathan Golden and many others launch Deviation Capital as the spin-out of the Two Sigma Ventures' business. At Deviation, the team and I will continue to invest in ambitious visionary founders who are trying to be the exceptions to conventional wisdom and status quo. Founders optimistic that information and AI can unlock new experiences, insights and discoveries. I owe thanks to all my now former colleagues at Two Sigma, especially including its founders who backed Two Sigma Ventures in many ways from day one, and who will continue as investors in Deviation’s next fund. We are excited to also maintain a formal connection with Two Sigma through a network of Two Sigma senior technical experts to continue to help us realize this exciting vision of what data + computing can create. We will now do it with a strong Deviation Capital presence in both NYC and San Francisco. Read more about it: deviation.com/launch The future is built by those who deviate.
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Nick Adams liked thisNick Adams liked this🎙️ We are hiring several key positions! A year ago, we (Allocate) had just over $1B on the platform. Today, we are at $4B+, with 300% YoY growth, and we now work with nearly 400 wealth advisory firms. To help us continue scaling, we are looking for several key positions, including building out our wealth advisory relationship team in CA, NY, and the Midwest. We're looking for people who are passionate about the private markets and want to solve the issues that most investors have with responsible participation. This is not just a sales role. It is a strategic seat that will work with wealth advisory CEOs, CIOs, and Advisors to help them build private market programs through our operating system that spans discovery, transactions, administration, reporting, and cash flow modeling. If you, or someone you know, is interested, please DM me directly, send me an email, or go to the careers page through the link below. Please like and/or comment for reach. cc: Peter Epstein Hana Yang Cooper J. Parks Austen McGregor David Taylor
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Nick Adams liked thisNick Adams liked thisI am excited to share undoubtedly our biggest dbt Core release yet - Orchestra State-Aware Orchestration 🔥 SAO is an Orchestra-managed python package built for dbt Core™ that allows users to store and use the state of models. This helps to orchestrate dbt Core™ more intelligently and only run models when certain conditions are met. With Orchestra SAO, Orchestra users can: 💸 Save cost and speed-up runs: the state of dbt models is stored using source_freshness checks which means models are skipped if there is no new data and no code has changed 🥵 Stop wasting time tagging models: adding build_after configurations allow for declarative scheduling. There is no need to manual tagging 🔀 Move to real-time: dbt state-aware can run every 10 or 5 minutes, enabling close-to-realtime patterns with leading ELT tools like Estuary Massive enterprises are already using SAO in Orchestra like Experian. Their analysts write dbt and Orchestra runs it. No complex orchestration framework required. No architectural bloat. No dbt spaghetti. In the time it took another massive comapny in the energy space JUST TO GET A DEMO of a legacy python-based orchestration tool (AHEM!), we had Orchestra SAO Set-up and working in the customer’s environment. Tons of resources and official announcement below 👇 Huge thanks to our partners and developing this Mike Holmes Paul Barton Austin Abraham Neil O'Connor Bobby Neelon South Shore Analytics Dawid Nawrot Ⓥ Nick Lisauskas James Burke Thomas in't Veld Tasman Analytics Vincent Low synogize and especially Josh Elston-Green Josh Brumpton Katie Gilmour. We could not have done this without you all!! A big shout-out to Will Davies Amy Chu and Oliver Crawford for making this vision come to life. #dataengineering #dbt #stateaware #orchestra
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McCarthy(s) Venture Mentor Network - Northeastern University
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MIT Clean Energy Prize
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Paul Perrett
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Harvrinder Athwal
🚀 Verif-y is redefining digital record management. With 9 State DOE contracts, 200+ institutions onboarded, and 90%+ margins, this AI-powered SaaS platform is solving a $20B+ global problem: fragmented, insecure, and outdated education and credential systems. Now raising $5M Seed funding to accelerate U.S. and international growth. 👉 For VCs and institutional investors: this is defensible, AI-driven SaaS with regulatory moats — the right product, right time. See www.verif-y.com Then DM me for more info. Join us on this funding round? Follow me on LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/e8bZ8srt
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How To SaaS
The move from early traction to scale forces a different set of capital decisions. In today's episode of the Private Equity Value Creation Podcast, Jonathan D. Drillings of Riverside Acceleration Capital talks with Shiv Narayanan about how B2B software companies fund that in-between phase—and why the wrong structure at the wrong moment creates problems later. Tune in to learn: - The role of growth lending in hitting milestones - How early equity affects dilution, valuation and future flexibility - What durability actually looks like before scaling - How AI affects risk without changing the fundamentals And much more. The link to the episode is in the comments below.
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Sharda Cherwoo
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